Unit-1 DH LAWRENCE: SONS and LOVERS
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Module-3 Unit-1 D.H. LAWRENCE: SONS AND LOVERS Structure: 3.1.1 Introduction 3.1.2 The Novel in the late 19th and early 20th century: An Overview 3.1.3 D.H Lawrence: His Fictional World 3.1.4 Locating Sons and Lovers in the Lawrence canon 3.1.5 Characters: A Sneak Peek 3.1.6 Chapter-wise Critical Summary 3.1.7 Analysis of Major Characters 3.1.8 Human Relationships in Sons and Lovers 3.1.9 Symbolism 3.1.10 Classifying Sons and Lovers as a Novel 3.1.11 Summing Up 3.1.12 Comprehension Exercises 3.1.13 Suggested Reading 3.1.1 Introduction Published in 1913, Sons and Lovers is D.H. Lawrence’s third novel, and one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. In the forty odd years between the publication of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), the last novel that you studied, and Sons and Lovers, the English novel developed in certain major respects. It would not be enough to only point out that Hardy was a Victorian novelist while Lawrence was modern. While that is true, what we also need to remember is that there are some striking continuities that we may detect between Hardy and Lawrence and again, there are certain aspects in which Lawrence brings something fresh and new to the English novel. Both Hardy and Lawrence are concerned with the ‘undefinable’, the ‘unanalysable’ and the ‘unresolved’. However, changes in attitudes, in society, in science, in beliefs in these forty years brought about many innovations in the form and content of novels. 176 Sons and Lovers is an intense and emotionally charged account of the coming of age of the novel’s hero Paul Morel, drawing heavily from Lawrence’s own experiences. Apart from being a vivid rendering of personal relationships, Sons and Lovers is also famous for its depiction of working class life in the mining town of Bestwood, Nottinghamshire, a thinly disguised portrait of Lawrence’s own hometown Eastwood. Like many of Lawrence’s other writings, this novel too depicts the abject conditions of the small mines of Nottinghamshire and is informed by Lawrence’s denunciation of industrialisation and his nostalgia for an older pre-industrial England. In the following pages, we will try to explore the various facets of Lawrence’s first major novel and attempt to arrive at a better understanding of the text in its various aspects as a bildungsroman, a family chronicle, and a psychological examination of love and sexuality. 3.1.2 The Novel in the late 19th and early 20th century: An Overview As you know, despite the popularity of poetry, it was the novel which was the most dominant form of literary production in the Victorian Age. Novels were the chief source of entertainment for the burgeoning middle class of England. It is interesting to note here that during the Victorian Era, the population of England more than doubled, from 14 million to 32 million. For this ever growing population, many different varieties of novels were written during the Victorian Age, for instance the novel of manners by William Makepeace Thackeray, the humanitarian and reformist novels of Charles Dickens, novels relating to social problems by Elizabeth Gaskell, romantic and Gothic novels by the Bronte sisters, novels exploring the genre of nonsense by Lewis Carroll, adventure novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, crime novels by Arthur Conan Doyle, the bildungsroman and exotic novels by Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde and so on. A detailed study and analysis of these writers is important to understand the breadth and variety of the Victorian novel but is beyond the scope of this brief account. While the early and mid Victorian novels are characterised by a dominant sense of moral and social ethic and an identification of the authors as observers of the particular age to which they belonged, the late nineteenth century is characterised by movements like realism, naturalism and aestheticism. The influence of certain major 177 nineteenth century thinkers like Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Karl Marx (1818– 1883), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) led to sweeping social and intellectual changes and laid the foundation of the modern age. The powerful ideas of these thinkers led to a questioning of several social, economic and religious beliefs that had hitherto been entrenched in the Victorian mindset. The Victorian era also witnessed some significant improvements in technology. The Industrial Revolution changed in a big way how people lived, worked, and traveled. These improvements in technology provided a number of unprecedented opportunities to the English people but they also led to a major upheaval in terms of how people lived and dealt with the world around them. This change was complicated further by the growth of the working classes. The growth of industrialism led to the creation of spectacular wealth but it also created an unbridgeable schism between the haves and the have-nots. These transitions from a predominantly pastoral lifestyle to one dominated by the urban milieu of the city, coupled with the changing dynamics between different social classes became one of the chief concerns of many writers including Lawrence. With regard to the novel, the last decades of the nineteenth century are dominated by Thomas Hardy. Hardy was a Victorian realist whose important novels include Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), With relation to Lawrence, the The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess important point to remember about of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude Hardy is the fact that he is often the Obscure (1895/6). All his novels considered to be Lawrence’s spiritual were set in the fictional region of father and many of the tendencies he Wessex and explored the themes of explored in his novels find full fate and suffering. He was a trenchant maturation in Lawrence’s works. critic of many Victorian social institutions. In one of Hardy’s most controversial novels, Jude the Obscure, the author provides a dramatic depiction of the stranglehold that the outdated divorce laws can have on people. In the same novel Hardy also criticizes the exclusivity of university admission norms and their discrimination on the basis of class. 3.1.3 D.H Lawrence: His Fictional World Novelist, poet, playwright, critic, painter and travel writer, David Herbert 178 Lawrence rose from very humble origins to become one of the most influential as well as controversial literary figures of the twentieth century. Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in the small mining town of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, the fourth child of his parents. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, worked as a coal miner in one of the many small mines that dotted the Nottinghamshire landscape, whereas his mother, Lydia Lawrence née Beardsall belonged originally to the middle class and was a former school teacher. When her fortunes fell after her marriage, she began supplementing her husband’s income by working from home as a lace maker. It is from his intellectual and ambitious mother that Lawrence inherited his love for books as well as his desire to rise above his working class origins. As a child, he was a shy, reserved boy, a misfit among his social peers, but was academically good enough to be first boy in the history of Eastwood to win a County Council scholarship to the Nottingham High School. Thus we may bear in mind, as Raymond Williams points out that the important thing to remember about Lawrence’s social responses to industrialization was that he was not merely a witness to it as a child, but someone who was caught in its processes, and it was no small miracle that he was able to break out of its shackles and fashion a literary career for himself, though it might have seemed obvious enough in retrospect. Lawrence began working as a clerk for a surgical goods manufacturer in 1901, but quit soon after, following his brother Ernest’s sudden death due to a skin disease. This was followed by his stint as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood. It was here that he met a young woman named Jessie Chambers, a farmer’s daughter who became his close friend and intellectual companion, and who was controversially portrayed as Miriam in Sons and Lovers. Jesse encouraged Lawrence to pursue writing seriously and submitted a collection of his poems to Ford Madox Ford, who subsequently published them in the English Review in 1909. In 1911, Lawrence’s first novel The White Peacock was published, a year after his mother’s death. By this time Lawrence had passed out from Nottingham University College and was writing frequently. In 1912 he met Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of his professor Ernest Weekly, and fell in love with her. Frieda left her husband and three children, and they eloped to Bavaria and then to Austria, Germany and Italy. They were married on July 13, 1914. He published his first play, The Daughter-in-Law, in 1912. A year later, he published his first volume of poetry: Love Poems and Others. In 1912, Lawrence’s second novel The Trespassers also appeared, and then in 1913, his first major novel, 179 the heavily autobiographical Sons and Lovers was published. Lawrence was very confident about this third novel of his, about which he asserted in a letter to his publisher Edward Garnett, “It is a great tragedy, and I tell you I’ve written a great book. It’s the tragedy of thousands of young men in England .... Read my novel – it’s a great novel.